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Throwaway lines that hint at untold stories

I wonder if they were actually fighting off the Borg, as their technology was on par with that of the Federation (at least by Picard’s time), and their space was closer to the DQ. We know from Voyager’s “Unity” that Romulans were assimilated by the Borg. Maybe they were preoccupied with keeping cubes away from their border.
I doubt it..l but only because I don’t think the Romulans could have won that fight.
 
Maybe the Borg threat was the impetus for pushing their ship and weapons development further along, resulting in those ginormous and powerful (and green) warbirds.

Kor
 
The Romulans nominally were an EMPIRE, so it's possible they meant wars of conquest against other races the Federation hasn't encountered yet as they are on the other side of Romulan space to the Neutral Zone.

The old PC game The Final Unity posited that the Romulans were fighting a war against a race known as the Chodak. A long respite allowed them to face the Federation again, but the Chodak came back with a vengeance in the game, having learnt the location of an ancient weapon of their ancestors located in Romulan space.

The Lost Unicorn Games RPG series had a similar scenario, with the Romulans fighting a superior foe called the Taurhai (a Federation-like culture but they believe in "uplifting" races by force rather than inviting them to join). The Romulans scored a desperate victory by a mass suicide attack on the Taurhai homeworld with a cloaked fleet, so the Taurhai are licking their wounds and the Romulans are able to turn their attention to old adversaries again.
 
The Tomed incident (after which the Romulans went into isolation fromt he UFP until TNG Season One). Would be interesting to see exactly what happened there.
 
The Vampire Cloud's attack upon the USS Farragut and a young James T.Kirk who froze at the controls would have been good! Plus Kirk meeting Koloth and Kang before their televised stories also would have been interesting!
JB
 
@The Old Mixer mentioned this one before, but it's really intriguing. From "The Conscience of the King":
MCCOY: Negative. Did you know this is the first time in a week I've had time for a drop of the true? Would you care for a drink, Mister Spock?
SPOCK: My father's race was spared the dubious benefits of alcohol.
MCCOY: Now I know why they were conquered. What are you so worried about, anyway? I find Jim generally knows what he's doing.
And then a season later, in "The Immunity Syndrome," Spock says this:
SPOCK: True. It is also true they never knew what was killing them. Their logic would not have permitted them to believe they were being killed.
KIRK: Explain.
SPOCK: Vulcan has not been conquered within its collective memory. The memory goes back so far that no Vulcan can conceive of a conqueror.
So which is it? Has Vulcan been conquered or hasn't it? Spock is probably the more reliable source here, but that just makes McCoy's statement all the more mystifying. Sure, McCoy was drinking in the first scene, but he still seemed to have his wits about him. Was he speaking figuratively somehow? Did "Conscience of the King" just feature a quick scene from the Mirror Universe? Did the Enterprise have some untold time travel adventure that removed a conqueror from Vulcan's history and collective memory?
 
No, I think he is talking about the Vulcan/Romulan schism which have been or seemed pretty violent which may have been the actual or not conquering that he is talking about. There is definitely a story there.

How about that alien race that was referred to that had the most sublime thoughts in the galaxy. Can't remember their name, but they seemed interesting.
 
No, I think he is talking about the Vulcan/Romulan schism which have been or seemed pretty violent which may have been the actual or not conquering that he is talking about. There is definitely a story there.

How about that alien race that was referred to that had the most sublime thoughts in the galaxy. Can't remember their name, but they seemed interesting.

What would McCoy know about the Vulcan/Romulan schism in season one? In "Balance of Terror" allegedly nobody knows what Romulans look like. So allegedly nobody knows that Romulans are a Vulcan offshoot until "Balance of Terror". So if McCoy ever learned anything about the ancestors of the Romulans in his Vulcan history class (if he ever took one) he wouldn't have heard them named as Romulans but as something else.

And remember that when Spock comments on the resemblance between Romulans and Vulcans he didn't say: "Aha! Those must be the ones who separated from Vulcan 2,455 years ago." Instead he said that it was likely that Romulans are some group descended from Vulcans. Obviously Spock didn't know enough to teach any history of the Romulan-Vulcan separation. He just speculated that Romulans were descended from Vulcans.

Which episode, "Balance of Terror" or "Conscience of the King" happens earlier? "Balance of Terror" was produced 9th, on July 20 to 28, 1966, and was broadcast 14th, on 15 December 1966, and has a beginning stardate of 1709.1. "Conscience of the King" was the 13th episode produced, on September 13 to 21, and the 13th episode broadcast, on 8 December 1966, and has a beginning stardate of 2817.6.

So "Balance of Terror" was probably before "Consicnce of the King", but not certainly. And even if "Balance of Terror" was before, would there be time to uncover the story of the separation vet between the Vulcans and the Romulans, and for Spock to give a lecture on that history on the ships educational channel?
 
Yea, you're right, I guess he meant being conquered by Humanity as a joke, (when it really may have been the other way around). Who were those aliens with sublime thoughts?
 
I take it as a bit of early installment weirdness suggesting that maybe somebody had the idea that Vulcans and humans actually had fought and the Vulcans lost.

It doesn't follow that it had to do with the Romulans leaving Vulcan, because the Romulans are the ones who had to leave.
 
So which is it? Has Vulcan been conquered or hasn't it? Spock is probably the more reliable source here, but that just makes McCoy's statement all the more mystifying. Sure, McCoy was drinking in the first scene, but he still seemed to have his wits about him. Was he speaking figuratively somehow? Did "Conscience of the King" just feature a quick scene from the Mirror Universe? Did the Enterprise have some untold time travel adventure that removed a conqueror from Vulcan's history and collective memory?

Why can't it be both. My thoughts are that from a Vulcanian perspective no they haven't ever been conquered. But because humanity was able to spread so fast, and probably influenced galactic perception so much that Vulcanian culture may have evolved to fit the stereotypes they humans had propagated about them. Even the name of the Vulcanians comes from an earth diety. They probably had a unique name for themselves, but after they were essentially culturally conquered, because everyone else was calling them by the human name, they just started using it too. Vulcanians in this era seem to be roughly analogous to Native Americans in westerns. Spock is the Tanto to Kirk's Lone Ranger.

So no. They weren't ever militarily conquered. But they were completely culturally sabotaaaged (read conquered) by those meddling humans.
 
My idea: Vulcan was "conquered" by some warring dictator millennia ago (a la a super-successful Napoleon or Alexander), who formed the first Vulcan planetary government in their pre-Surak days (that broke apart before or during Surak's time).

Earth was never conquered by one figure, instead uniting under a democratic regime after the post-atomic horror.

Spock was thinking about extraterrestrial conquests, which Vulcan was spared. And when he spoke of collective memory, he was specifically referring to the logic-following Vulcan culture, not the one that predated it.
 
This would be more understandable if there was a real world example

I think the Americanization of countries around the world could be a good example of non-military conquest.

As far as naming goes many Native American tribes are named differently than they refer to themselves in their own languages.

So there's a McDonalds on Vulcan owned by a couple of Ferengis?

Probably. Haha. Actually though, Vulcanians seem to keep to themselves. We don't see them having vast numbers of colonies like humans do. That could have contributed to the humans being able to conquer them. Simply by out numbering and misrepresenting them in the galactic playing field.
 
How and why the Klingons left the Federation (which Season 1 and 2 suggests they were members of before it's retconned).

Maybe to do with this War in the recent past that Riker mentions:

RIKER: That's what your people said a few years ago about humans. Think how many died on both sides in that war. Would you and I be here now like this if we hadn't been able to let go of the anger and the blame?
 
I always that list of situations duplicate Tuvok and Chakotay said in "COURSE: OBLIVION" would make great episodes... especially if the real ship encountered them after the duplicate.
 
The Eugenics Wars.

I'd love an alt-history (as in, alternate to ours) series set in the 1990's about Khan rising to power, being deposed and fleeing into space.

And probably the in the 2030's World War III somehow as a coda.
 
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